Six questions to ask your child's coach about weight

Parents ask coaches whether it is safe. It is the natural question and it is useless, because the honest answer and the reassuring answer sound identical. The six below cannot be answered with reassurance.

None of this requires you to know anything about nutrition. You are not checking the science. You are checking whether a plan exists and whether anybody besides the coach has seen it.

1. How was this weight class chosen?

You want to hear a starting point and a reason. Something measured, and a category that sits close to what your child already weighs when he is eating normally.

What should worry you is a reason that comes from the team rather than from the child: the class is open, nobody else can fill it, the draw looks easier there.

That is a real consideration in a coach's job, and it is not a reason to move a growing body.

2. How much has to come off, and over how many weeks?

The answer should contain a rate, not just a target. Weeks and a gradual figure, not a number and a date.

For reference, the one sport that regulates this properly caps the descent at an average of 1.5 percent of body weight a week and treats that as a monitored maximum rather than a plan. That is the shape of a defensible answer. A coach who says "he needs to be at 52 by the 14th" has given you a target and no method, and the method is where children get hurt.

3. What happens in the last week?

Ask it plainly, and name the things: is there any sweating work, any restriction of food, any restriction of fluid.

At this age the answer should be no to all three. Sweat suits, hot rooms, saunas and fluid restriction appear by name in guidance for youth wrestling as practices to be prohibited, not managed. If the answer is a version of "just a light sweat the night before", you have learned that the last week is unsupervised improvisation, and that is precisely when the damage happens.

4. Who else knows about this plan?

The right answer includes somebody who is not the coach: a doctor, a dietitian, the club's medical contact, and you.

Where minimum weight rules exist, this is written into them. The American school programme requires the athlete, the parents or guardians, a health professional and the coach to be part of establishing the number. That structure exists because a decision taken between a 14-year-old and one adult who wants a result is a decision with nobody in the room to say no.

Ask for it in writing. Not a contract, just an email with the category, the timeline and what happens in the last week. A coach with a plan can send that in 5 minutes.

A coach without one cannot send it at all.

5. What happens if he doesn't make weight?

This question does more work than the other five together, because it asks about consequences rather than intentions.

You are listening for whether missing weight is treated as a normal outcome that gets handled, or as a failure the child must avoid at any cost. The second version is what produces a boy sitting in a bin bag at midnight, and it is a culture rather than a plan.

6. When do we look at this again?

Children grow. A category that was reasonable in September may be wrong by February, and the figure that produced it is out of date long before anybody notices.

A good answer includes a review. Every few months, on an ordinary week, with the child eating and training normally. No review means the plan is a one-off decision applied to a body that keeps changing, and the pressure only ever goes one way.

If the answers are wrong

You do not have to win an argument about physiology, and you will not. You have one piece of authority the coach does not, which is that the entry is yours to withhold.

Say that your child will compete at the category he walks around at, and that you will look again in 3 months. It is not a dramatic position, it is what the evidence supports, and most coaches accept it without much fuss once they know a parent is paying attention.

If the answers were poor across several questions rather than one, the problem is the club and not the plan. Warning signs a club handles weight badly sets out what to look for before you decide.